“If you search our Lord in the spirit of truth,” says he to the Jesuits of Goa, “and generously walk in those ways, which conduct you to him, the spiritual delights, which you taste in his service, will sweeten all those bitter agonies, which the conquest of yourselves will cost you.  O my God, how grossly stupid is mankind not to comprehend, that, by a faint and cowardly resistance of the assaults of the devil, they deprive themselves of the most pure and sincere delights which life can give them.”

By the daily practice of these maxims, Xavier came to be so absolute a master of his passions, that he knew not what it was to have the least motion of choler and impatience; and from thence proceeded partly, that tranquillity of soul, that equality of countenance, that perpetual cheerfulness, which rendered him so easy and so acceptable in all companies.

It is natural for a man, who is extremely mortified, to be chaste; and so was Xavier, to such a degree of perfection, that we have it certified from his ghostly fathers, and, amongst others, from the vicar of Meliapore, that he lived and died a virgin.  From his youth upward he had an extreme horror for impurity; notwithstanding, that he was of a sanguine complexion, and naturally loved pleasure.  While he was a student at Paris, and dwelt in the college of Sainte Barbe, his tutor in philosophy, who was a man lost in debauches, and who died of a dishonest disease, carried his scholars by night to brothel-houses.  The abominable man did all he could towards the debauching of Francis Xavier, who was handsome, and well shaped, but he could never accomplish his wicked purpose; so much was the youth estranged from the uncleanness of all fleshly pleasures.

For what remains, nothing can more clearly make out his love to purity, than what happened to him once at Rome.  Simon Rodriguez being fallen sick, Father Ignatius commanded Xavier to take care of him during his distemper.  One night, the sick man awaking, saw Xavier, who was asleep at his bed’s feet, thrusting out his arms in a dream, with the action of one who violently repels an enemy; he observed him even casting out blood in great abundance, through his nostrils, and at his mouth.  Xavier himself awaking, with the labour of that struggling, Rodriguez enquired of him the cause of that extreme agitation, and the gushing of his blood.  Xavier would not satisfy him at that time, and gave him no account of it, till he was just upon his departure to the Indies; for then being urged anew by Rodriguez, after he had obliged him to secrecy, “Know,” said he, “my brother, master Simon, that God, out of his wonderful mercy, has done me the favour, to preserve me, even till this hour, in entire purity; and that very night I dreamed, that, lodging at an inn, an impudent woman would needs approach me:  The motion of my arms was to thrust her from me, and to get rid of her; and the blood, which I threw out, proceeded from my agony.”